On the outside of the planetarium, the application of the exterior finish has begun. This is known as an EIFS, or Exterior Insulation Finish System, which has been used at Valley Children's Hospital and on our own Alumni House here at CSUF. There are many ways to install such a system (see the Dryvit home page), most of which use adhesives. In our case, however, we have gone with mechanical attachment of the panels to the building.

The white material applied to the bottom of the building is Tyvek Stuccowrap, a trademarked name of the Dupont corporation. This material forms a vapor barrier and has vertical channels embossed in it to drain moisture that might get behind the foam. In the inset on the picture at the right, we see that this material is simply stapled into place.

In the second step, sheets of expanded polystyrene are cut to shape, fitted into the special baseboard and tacked into place with regular wood screws. As can be seen in the inset, we have smoothed-sided foam board applied directly to the Stuccowrap.

Once the foam board has been positioned, special red fasteners are used that are shaped like wide plastic baskets. These are spaced closely enough to keep the board firmly attached to the building. All of these fasteners will be covered with the Dryvit material during the final stages of the finish. Once dry, the Dryvit takes on the appearance of stone, but has the flexibility of a polymeric material.

In a variation from earlier information I had been given, no special flashing is applied around the windows and doors before installation of the EIFS system. I asked about this and was told by one of the workmen that a gap would be left between the foam board and the windows. Then, during the final stage of finish application, special Dryvit material will be forced into the openings to caulk them shut.

I have some additional information about the Dryvit installation. The edges by the windows have been fitted with a blue mesh called a backwrap. This will be folded back around the edges of the foam board to hold things together when the finish is applied. Specially formulated compound will be injected around the windows to seal them tightly to the building. A base coat will then be applied to the foam board. The final Dryvit coating--the one that looks like stone--is applied on top of that.

Note the different levels of foam board that provide variety and interest to the exterior of the building. Once these are all installed, electrically heated knives and special routers will be used to cut additional decorations into the foam.

Check out our lights in the ceiling of the lobby. Westech now has power to them. Don't they look great! We are running the building on a big extension cord at the moment, but our new date to be put on the University grid is now the weekend after next.

As I came in today I met the person who was installing the tiles in the drop ceiling. I didn't get his picture, but his ceilings look very nice. In the view down the hall we can see some of the lighting as well as the drinking fountain.

In the picture taken from the third floor of the Science Building, we see the current state of the exterior finish.

I arrived on site later that afternoon. From the sounds coming from the interior, I suspected that our lobby floor was being installed. You haven't lived until you've heard the sound of granite being cut by a high-speed saw.

In the background in the picture on the right we see Russell Tedrick, President of Tedrick Tile, Inc., hard at work installing the tile. His colleague in the foreground is Ruben Mendoza. If you look carefully at the picture, you can see the shaft of sunlight from our sundial slit window slanting across the area. After the granite is all installed, the time patterns will be sandblasted into the floor.



The picture above and to the left was taken yesterday. I got up onto the catwalk and shot this through the exterior of the dome. Light and images do get through. Our site supervisor, Troy Horne, has draped the interior with plastic to protect the cleanliness dome while the hard cap is constructed beneath the catwalk. Filtered air is pumped into the interior to maintain positive pressure and keep the dust out. Construction of the hard cap will produce the ceiling around the edges of the Star Theatre.

The granite tile is all installed, both in the lobby and down the hallways. The crew is cleaning the surface today and doing other finish work, but the job is essentially done. On the leftmost picture it looks like the light from the slit is coming right at the camera, but this is just a reflection. The actual shaft of sunlight is right between the two people on the floor. The picture was taken at 1:17 p.m. today. Someday soon the floor itself will tell us that.



Inside the Star Theatre the underside of the catwalk is being fitted with lights and with a frame for the ceiling that runs beneath it.

The building is now fully powered. We were put on the grid this past weekend.

Today we find John Burns Construction installing the sheet rock for the ceiling beneath the catwalk inside the Star Theatre.

Outside in the lobby, Troy Horne is explaining some details of the sound-soak wall panels to Steve White, the Planetarium Director and Jon Wheless, the oversight consultant. Steve has also been working on the various supports for the projectors that will go into the Star Theatre. We are starting to think about the first shows in January or February of 2000.

The people from Four C's sheet metal service in Clovis are here to install our copper roof!

First they put down special material that protects against corrosion reactions with the nails in the existing roof covering, then they lay down the 20 ounce copper sheeting. As you can see from the inset, this stuff is very shiny. In time it will weather to the nice green patina typical of established copper roofs. I later caught Gerald Keyes on the ground and was able to talk briefly with him. He's the one in the red shirt. His colleagues are Jason and Tim.

You may notice that the exterior of the building appears exactly the same as it was almost two weeks ago. The EIFS installation is stalled at the moment until we resolve a dispute over the materials used.

Today they had copper running from the peak to the edge down all four sides of the roof. With these in place we should see the remaining copper going on fairly quickly. Toward the end of the afternoon, however, they had to cover the entire roof with polyethylene. Rain is forecast for tonight and tomorrow.



Down in the lobby Ruben Ruiz from City-Wide Glass and Troy Horne are discussing the exact shade of glass to be put into the slit window. In the picture on the left I've turned the date and time stamp on in my camera, so you can correlate time and sun position. On the right my camera was not quite able to pick up the difference in color between the trial piece of mirrored glass and the clear hole cut into the middle of it. They plan to darken the tint to increase the contrast.

We missed the rain, but as the front came through we got a pretty brisk wind that took off a lot of the plastic film and shredded portions of the felting that goes under the copper. Even so, work proceeded quickly this morning. Each strip of copper is one long sheet, which must have made for tricky handling as the wind continued to blow.

If you click on the picture on the upper left, be warned it is a 1280x960 pixel image 316K in size. If you can tolerate the download wait, you can see a lot of detail on the Downing Planetarium.

The picture on the lower right is an experiment in long-lens digital zoom and post processing to remove image softening caused by the glass I was shooting through. If you click on the picture, the normal 100K downloaded image shows a rather painterly effect.

Later this afternoon I found Steve Galvan and George Ortega of Galvan Cabinets and Specialties installing the two inset display cabinets that are part of the lobby. After they get the sizes and fit worked out, they will remove these cabinets, put the final finish on them, then return for final installation.